28 May 2009

Since months ago, while I was running my webcomic I wanted to experiment with something different (no worry, is an one-shot, will not transform in a series), but I needed a lot of logistics for it and had to wait for the right time, the eLiberatica conference when I got the actors, the costumes, the props, the background, almost everything (not everything since I lacked the time to develop a better story).

When I took the photos the story was supposed to be different but when looking at the photos I noticed the boys are doing "the sign" wrongly so my first reaction was to crap the photos and ask them removed from Fedora for not getting such basic things. But then I realized the photographer (me) is guilty, as he has the duty to ensure the subjects are in the correct place and position, so scrapped the plan B and went back to the cartoon but with an adapted story.

Note: it was made with a combination of GIMP and Inkscape, maybe one day I will get the time to write a tutorial about the process.

27 May 2009

We could have used more Fedora stickers at eLiberatica and as Mo's design is not as easy for a "make yourself" scenario, I took my old design and made a few adaptations for "fredom, friends, features, first". It is an A6, so you can print 4 of them on an A4. A bit late, but maybe there is some use for them...

25 May 2009

There are already a lot of links to one of my groups photos with all the communities together, but thanks to Alex, this one has notes, labelling all the participants:

Our booth could have used a couple more posters, we had some empty space on its walls, IMO it was above average, not as nice as Mozilla's, but miles away from the wasteland at Sun (RIP). Our matching T-shirts made an impression and gave about 200 LiveCDs. We could have used some more stickers: a lot of people asked if we have (seeing some on the booth's walls), but having only a few sheets, we decided to keep them hidden and gave only to some contributors, to a few pretty girls (who asked for stickers) and to Danese Cooper, thinking they are well placed (strategically) on Open Source Diva's laptop.

We used the opportunity and befriended with other communities, like Ceata and OpenSUSE (with Ubuntu and GSL we are in contact for a longer time but they to not take well our jokes). And, as you can see below, from the OpenSUSE guys Fedora and Ubuntu receive equal treatment:

Now some thanks are in order, a lot of people contributed (directly or indirectly) to this event: Joerg, who had the initiative for participation, Max, who sent me CDs and T-shirt (they also provided funding and sponsorship), Tatica who made one of the posters we were using and a nice 3D animation we had on loop on one laptop, Mo who created the other poster, Ian, the creator of the business cards template and generator (we were giving those like crazy) and, of course, the participants: our star speaker Jeroen and the local community: Adrian, Ionut and Alexandru.

24 May 2009

The second day of the eLiberatica conference was quieter, with a lot less visitors, probably because it was a Saturday and the students preferred to stay away from the university, but it still was a fun day, we talked with people and gave CDs and business cards. We had also more time to interact with the other communities present at the event.

early in the morning, warming-up the booth

I was still busy, even did some serious work (helped the guys from Ceata with a simplified version of their logo, my first try was a bit too busy), so I didn't took as many photos as intended, but the other guys roamed around with my camera and captured a lot of things.

this is how a FOSS conference is supposed to be...

At the end of the day, we all went to a large hall (the Rectorate) for a party (food, drinks, music, dance) and more friendly talks and the conference ended (we were tired and didn't go to the late-night party at some restaurant).

Fedora + Mozilla

I will follow later with a couple more posts: conclusions, funny stuff...

23 May 2009

Too bad I don't have photos with our booth in full activity, the first day of eLiberatica was intense, at peak moments all 4 of us were busy talking with people, handling liveCDs and business cards... It was fun, a lot of students used with Ubuntu from the computer labs at their universities and curious about what Fedora is, grumpy old sysadmins happy with Fedora in their enterprise but complaining for some bugs and even professors at an university in a smaller city researching ways to start using Linux and so on.

It was also an opportunity for my camera nastiness, this time I annoyed Jeroen with the flash during his talk but, in my defense, he moved a loot, the light was not enough an I insisted in trying to capture a portrait...

One thing I was curious about, was the appearance of the lame guy Manac, who was supposed to participate as a Red Hat partner, a bronze sponsor of the conference and even as a speaker (but not talking about Red Hat, Fedora or Linux). I was curious to see if he at least shows at our booth... but in the end he didn't came at all, his talking space was left empty, pretty much that I knew about his business model.

22 May 2009

The image quality is poor and the sound even worse as we used ajoian's compact photo camera, but we at least have a Romanian version of the "I am Fedora" video, featuring Nicu, Adrian, Alexandru and Ionut.

...and if you are using a lame browser without support for the video tag, you can watch a a Flash version on YouTube.

On-location report, directly from eLiberatica: those conferences have a less known part about which people not talk that much, so I'll break the silence. The night before the guest have to get a contact with the city:

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And this contact is fun when it begins with a couple of palinca shots, continue with an unknown number of tequilas (I believe not even the waiter counted them...), everything washed with beers.

Next morning the first thing to do is to take care of the desolated booth and bring it to a presentable state:

21 May 2009

Q: How long is the life of a certain Fedora release?A: About 13 months.

Q: When the Fedora Webcomic started?A: Roughly 13 months ago.

Q: Do you get where I am going with this?A: I'm afraid so...

Q: Why it died?A: Mostly by loneliness.

Q: So will it disappear from the face of the web?A: No, it will remain archived, together with the SVG sources at its canonical location.

It was a hard decision, as I had a lot of fun working on it and it was a fruit of passion, but the decision was taken long time ago (October-November) and the final graphic was implemented back on February: the writing was on the wall for quite some time. I continued it for months mainly due to my stubborness and waited for a milestone and a credible(?) excuse to get out.

Good thing I didn't set any performance metric for the comic, otherwise I would have been sad about it not meeting any of the expectations... So not having enough data, I can't make any conclusion: it failed due my poor implementation (graphics, stories) or due to my decision to address such a narrow niche (Fedora and Fedora on the desktop). But I have enough data (comments, traffic, link backs, translations) to conclude it was a failure.

19 May 2009

When I was a kid I used to play with those flowers, which I knew as "Lion's Mouth", if you press it on the "cheeks", it looks like a lion mouth opening and apparently this is an international name... hmmm, a flower about Fedora 11?

Usually I post such stuff only on my photoblog, but this series has a community-oriented story: Mola showed his photo of a snail, which made me to feel the urge to show my own view on the subject. For the "decisive moment" I had to wait a bit over one month, until today: a warm, sunny morning, following a night with heavy rains, the perfect opportunity for the snails to get out.

This and another series of photos (roses look also beautiful after a rain) made me to get today about 1 hour late to work :D But there are more funny effects of this story: to take a good, still shot of the snail I had to lean on my knees and elbows on the wet, dirty ground, so today at work my jeans are a total mess.

13 May 2009

I made a bit of free time and printed some stuff (a poster made by Mo, another from Tatica, yet another from me and bussiness cards from Ian for a few ambassadors) to make our booth pretty at eLiberatica next week, hope it will be prettier than the "competition".

And there is a funny story: when I went to the print shop to pick the stuff, it was not yet ready, the guy still had to print and I was shocked to see him with a Linux desktop (shocked as I knew them exclusively Windows+Photoshop+Corel Draw) so I asked about it. It seems like the software for controlling the plotter (an old Xerox something) is made by Caldera and runs exclusively on Linux. So the operator has a dual boot, doing everything in Windows and rebooting in Linux to send the job to the plotter :D

12 May 2009

After Richard showed a panoramic photo made with Hugin and Kushal followed with his own, I tried to overcome the bad impression from my first encounter with the application, which was a total failure, and try again, using some old photos I had around:

The trick was to 1. use an automatic stitcher (not available in Fedora due to patent restriction in the USA) and 2. do a batch resize (simple ImageMagick usage), so the file sized, bot for working images and final result, are manageable.

The first step was to install the autopano SIFT plugin from RPM Fusion:

And then go to Hugin's preferences and replace the stub script with the working one (this was not obvious to me at first, had to dig a bit):

And that is all, now you can use Hugin at will and compose your own panoramic images.

07 May 2009

Not sure if you are aware, the slogan for Fedora 11 was selected to be "Reign".

Yet another week when I had two competing ideas, the other one was about a magician "abracadabra... presto!" pulling some tiny packaged from his hat, the public is unimpressed, then he "abracadabra... presto!" again and the packages grow huge. The public is in awe, wanting this feature "yesterday" but is saddened to hear they hare too young and have to wait at least 6 months more for that. Some considered this funnier, but my choice was to make a statement.

06 May 2009

The recent, informative recent post by davidz about the new storage handling in GNOME helped me a lot in understanding the error message that scared the shit out of me when trying Fedora 11 Preview (with a LiveUSB) on my Eee PC.

It was instant panic when I saw it, so obviously I was in a hurry to see the details:

There is an one single error: the hard drive temperature at around 50°C and I calmed down a bit. Later searched a bit on Google and it looks like this is an usual hard drive temperature for netbooks, where the ventilation is limited. Pretty much like a scary false alarm (but maybe I am just ignorant here).

Overall, the application could be, IMO, better worded: even the item passing the test (green dots) are labeled "Pre-fail" making you feel something bad is going to happen.

I don't know, maybe this is a philosophical view: anything living is going to die and anything working is going to fail, life is pre-death and working is pre-fail.

Since a few weeks when Rahul started packaging Gnote for both Rawhide and F10, I became a huge fan of the application, it does everything I needed from Tomboy and its author has frequent releases, with lot of features added and bugs fixed (the 0.3.1 release crossed the threshold for me). On top of that, I was able to remove the Mono stack from my computer (has using it exclusively for Tomboy), I am more Free now.

05 May 2009

There is a cool exchange of poster design from our LATAM friends, one with a wonderful 3D look from Tatica (slightly polished by me and Martin) and a movie-like another from Jayme so I last felt enough motivation and put my butt to work and sketched an idea screaming to get out of my head for quite some time (just sketch with a lot of room left for improvement):